Progress on Software-defined Networking Standardization Explored in Computer

Software-defined networking will give administrators unprecedented flexibility, increasing control of network traffic and applications and taking management down to a granular level.
By: www.computer.org
 
LOS ANGELES - Nov. 27, 2014 - PRLog -- LOS ALAMITOS, Calif., 25 November 2014 — Software-defined networking will give administrators unprecedented flexibility, increasing control of network traffic and applications and taking management down to a granular level. The promise of SDN is so great that IDC estimates that the global market for SDN will increase eightfold to US $8 billion by 2018.

But before that can happen, the industry must overcome interoperability and standards challenges. IEEE Computer Society's flagship magazine,Computer (http://www.computer.org/portal/web/computingnow/computer), in its November issue explores SDN and the standards-related progress being made to take SDN into the computing domain.

"Cloud computing's first wave began with server centralization and virtualization—resulting in a paradigm shift that changed how data is stored and how software is used," said guest editor Ying-Dar Lin, an IEEE Fellow and distinguished professor of computer science at National Chiao Tung University (NCTU) in Taiwan. "The emerging second wave, SDN, takes network centralization and virtualization, and especially network control, into the cloud. Similar to the smartphone ecosystem, SDN's programmability will turn various network appliances to a warehouse of "apps."

Manageable, cost-effective, and adaptable in keeping with today's high-bandwidth, dynamic applications, SDN architectures decouple network control and forwarding functions, allowing network control to be programmable and the underlying infrastructure to be separated from applications and network services.

After emerging in datacenters, SDN deployment has grown up into the networking-as-a-service (NaaS) model that cloud service providers may offer to enterprise and residential subscribers. SDN significantly reduces the number of appliances and administrators required and as a result reduces capital and operational expenses.

In general, SDN takes networking into the computing domain and will increasingly adopt the standardization practices common for computing and software. The standards bodies currently involved include the Open Networking Foundation (ONF), the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI), and the International Telecommunication Union (ITU).

The articles in the November issue of Computer explore a variety of SDN standardization perspectives:

"SDN and OpenFlow Evolution: A Standards Perspective" by Jean Tourrilhes, Puneet Sharma, Sujata Banerjee, and Justin Pettit, describes how the SDN framework and the OpenFlow protocol have evolved during ONF's standardization process.
"Aligning Technology and Market Drivers in an Open Source Standards Testing Program" by Rick Bauer, Ron Milford, and Li Zhen, presents and analyzes ONF's testing program.
"Service Function Chaining: Creating a Service Plane via Network Service Headers," by Paul Quinn and Jim Guichard, outlines how the NSH protocol provides the required data plane information needed to meet the promised goals.
In "When Open Source Meets Network Control Planes," Christian Esteve Rothenberg, Roy Chua, Josh Bailey, Martin Winter, Carlos Corrêa, Sidney C. de Lucena, Marcos Rogério Salvador, and Thomas D. Nadeau discuss the role that open source plays in transforming SDN's software and hardware in the networking landscape.
In "Software-Defined Networks: Incremental Deployment with Panopticon," Marco Canini, Anja Feldmann, Dan Levin, Fabian Schaffert, and Stefan Schmid describe an incremental approach that combines traditional and SDN switches through interim hybrid networks.
And in "Virtualization of Home Network Gateways," Marion Dillon and Timothy Winters present network function virtualization with an example that aims to move the home network gateway to the cloud.

"This first special issue of Computer devoted to SDN focuses on standardization. While we expect future issues will broaden this scope, we hope the articles included here will provide readers with a snapshot that suggests the prospects and many possibilities for this developing technology," said guest editor Dan Pitt, executive director of the Open Networking Foundation.  "In particular, we eagerly follow – and encourage – the proof point of working code as a rapid avenue toward proven de facto standards, especially since software definition is the essence of SDN."

Other guest editors who worked on the issue are David Hausheer, an assistant professor at the Technische Universität Darmstadt; Erica Johnson, director of the University of New Hampshire InterOperability Laboratory; and Yi-Bing Lin, a chair professor at National Chiao Tung Univeristy.

To receive Computer magazine, join IEEE Computer Society (http://www.computer.org/join) or subscribe to the digital edition (http://www.qmags.com/magazines/PubHomePage.asp?publicatio...) via Qmags.

About IEEE Computer Society

IEEE Computer Society is the world's leading computing membership organization and the trusted information and career-development source for a global workforce of technology leaders including: professors, researchers, software engineers, IT professionals, employers, and students. The unmatched source for technology information, inspiration, and collaboration, the IEEE Computer Society is the source that computing professionals trust to provide high-quality, state-of-the-art information on an on-demand basis. The Computer Society provides a wide range of forums for top minds to come together, including technical conferences (http://www.computer.org/portal/web/conferences/home), publications (http://www.computer.org/portal/web/publications), and a comprehensive digital library (http://www.computer.org/portal/web/csdl), unique training webinars (http://www.computer.org/portal/web/webinars), professional training (http://www.computer.org/portal/web/e-learning/home), and the TechLeader Training Partner Program (http://www.computer.org/portal/web/Corporate-Programs/T2P2) to help organizations increase their staff's technical knowledge and expertise, as well as the personalized information tool myComputer (http://www.computer.org/portal/web/Corporate-Programs/myComputer). To find out more about the community for technology leaders, visit http://www.computer.org.

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